Daniel, until 1913, the Senate was entirely an appointed body.
The U.S. government was largely based on the British constitution of the time – greatly admired by many of the Founders - with the Senate having the role of the House of Lords, hardly a democratic model.
(Indeed, the president represented the king in the original scheme, with a number of the Founders favoring a lifetime appointment or a ten-year term. As it was, the Electoral College concept - taken from old systems like the election of the Holy Roman Emperor - made him not directly elected by the popular vote. In the early days the popular vote didn't even matter.
The College vote did - by a small group of elites - the college not having to conform to popular sentiment at all – or what there was of it since in a place like Virginia about one percent of the population had the franchise. Indeed, technically this remains true today, although the College would never dare deliberately overturn the popular vote. Still, we get minority presidents frequently because of the winner-take-all element in the state-by-state votes.)
The anti-democratic Senate is the body with the real power. Having to approve every major presidential appointment and treaty negotiated as well as all legislation from the “People’s House” or the president, the Senate can virtually emasculate an elected president.
Even with election today, the Senate remains highly anti-democratic.
It is elected in a staggered fashion, one-third every two years, so that its basic composition cannot be changed in any one election. Public concern or burning issues largely don’t effect it.
The requirement for a super-majority (60%) to overcome a filibuster truly means the Senate does not work with normal democratic rules under any of its deliberations.
The fact that the Vice-President is given the role of tie-breaker in the Senate - his only genuine Constitutional duty - is also anti-democratic because, as you know, the silly office of Vice-president is filled by selection of a presidential candidate.
You cannot vote separately for President and Vice-president, although, in the early Republic, Electors could, and sometimes Vice-presidential candidates wound up as President. In the original thinking, the Vice-president really does represent something like the Prince of Wales, a king in waiting, although his role as prince-in-waiting ends with the next election.
The Senate’s bizarre two seats for every state - the Great Compromise protecting the interests of under-populated slave states - means today that one of the Senators from California "represents" sixteen million people. At the same time, one of the Senators from New Hampshire represents about three hundred and fifty thousand - very democratic, especially when you consider the Senate’s immense power.
Because Senators from big states today cannot possibly shake hands with all their constituents, even if that's all they did for six years, then advertising and marketing play a key role in elections.
It is estimated a Senator on average spends two-thirds of his/her time in office collecting and soliciting campaign money. Once the money is received, the quid pro quo is access by lobbyists for the next six years. Again, very democratic.
The Founders, most of them, did not trust or even like the idea of democracy. The word had the connotation among members of the Constitutional Convention similar to “communism” in 1950s America. That’s why there are all the extremely conservative designs in the Constitution, with the Constitution being by design an immensely difficult thing to alter.
The sense of democracy you feel in America today comes only after more than two hundred years of rebellions, wars, and crises gradually making America a fairly democratic place. But the nature of the Senate – its powers, manner of election, and financing - provides the real measure of how far removed even today America remains from democracy.
Colin Powell couldn’t have been more wrong when he answered the French at the U.N., in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq, that America was the world’s oldest democracy.
